1. Field
The present invention is in the field of telecommunications and pertains particularly to methods and apparatus for testing and controlling telephony state in a contact center.
2. Discussion of the State of the Art
Contact centers are utilized by corporations and other businesses to interact with customers of contracting entities to fulfill their needs relative to customer service, transacting, and client development. A typical contact center conducts business with customers through myriad different channels of interaction. State-of-art contact centers may support incoming and outgoing voice interactions using session initiated protocol (SIP) in addition to the more traditional computer telephony integration (CTI) voice calls.
A contact center is charged generally with testing telephony connections and infrastructure and maintaining active state of all interaction and reporting state according to certain service level agreements (SLAs) the center might have in place with various parties to a contract. In a contact center that supports both traditional CTI telephony and SIP telephony concurrently, the tools for testing SIP and CTI functionality including connection state and integrity are separately implemented in many cases and do not provide functionality or results in one interface, adding to the complexity of testing and maintaining telephony function in the center.
More particularly, SIP oriented testing tools typically lack CTI integration requiring complicated scripting in order to accomplish such integration. Furthermore, CTI-oriented test tools work generally only in the control path and cannot provide first party call control or voice path verification. As a result, fully automated tests of complex telephony scenarios are not practically possible with traditional tools.
Therefore, what is clearly needed is a graphical user interface application that combines first and third party call control functionality, graphical representation of telephony objects, signal path testing functionality, and integration with scripting tools.